Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

“Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead.”

Any house can be haunted with a little imagination and a few dead people. A crumbling gothic mansion or a suburban split level can host all manner of spirits. In 2001, the ghosts took up residence in a beautiful English manor house in Alejandro Amenábar’s first English language film, The Others. Starring Nicole Kidman as the tightly wound lady of the house, the film was moderately well received by critics and successful at the box office. In recent years, it’s been recognized as an underappreciated gem and some of Kidman’s best work; it joined the Criterion Collection in 2023.

Ghosts are what we make of them; every ghost story makes its own rules, its own spectral conventions. Some ghosts can walk through walls, some can touch objects and even people. The bureaucracy of Beetlejuice’s ghosts is worlds apart from the gothic tragedy of Crimson Peak. Most ghosts, however, are stuck somewhere. They’re tied by their unfinished business to the place where they died, or where they spent the most important part of their lives. They haunt their house. But whose house is it? What happens when multiple generations of owners all feel that a house is theirs to live in, to die in, to stay forever?

The Others begins with a title card welcoming the viewer to the Channel Island of Jersey, 1945. A near constant fog rolls across the grounds, and the house is massive, cold, and imposing. Kidman’s Grace is the mother to two young children, Anne and Nicholas, both suffering from the same mysterious “light sensitivity.” As a result, Grace has hung heavy drapes from every window of the house, and instituted strict rules about the children’s movements from room to room, ensuring they are never exposed to the sun. The house is choked in darkness, despite the majority of the film taking place during the day. Grace hasn’t heard from her husband, Charles, since before the war ended. She assures Anne and Nicholas that he’ll return, hiding the fact that the war is over. In a household that prizes silence, as Grace proclaims, she and the children move solemnly and quietly, as if they are both haunted and haunting.

Alone with the children following the German occupation of Jersey and the end of World War II, Grace is relieved when three former employees of the estate turn up hoping to resume their work. Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and young Lydia are eager to work and knowledgeable about the house and grounds. They seem protective of the house itself, and Mrs. Mills in particular exhibits something like ownership over it. At first helpful and kind, things begin to turn as Grace grows suspicious of their motives.

Even before the arrival of Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia, strange things have been happening in the house. Grace, a devout Catholic, starts to question her own reality. She hears mysterious footsteps and voices, the piano plays on its own, and her daughter, Anne, claims to be visited by a little boy and his family. “I don’t like fantasies, strange ideas,” she said, while extolling the virtues of keeping a cool head. Anne, the older child, tells stories about her mother “going mad,” which Grace vehemently denies. She’s frequently punished by Grace, isolated in various locked rooms reciting Bible verses and stories. Grace warns her she’ll be sent to limbo, where lying children end up. Grace seems oblivious to the fact that everyone in that house is already in limbo.     

The Others is a beautifully stylish film from the moment it begins, with an opening credits sequence full of beautiful black and white illustrations of the house, the children, the story, lit by the warm glow of candles. The look of the film in general, gloomy and isolating, takes advantage not only of the darkened rooms necessitated by the plot, but also the artifacts of the house’s past. A tuberculosis outbreak fifty years prior to the events of the film figures heavily into the story, and both the house and its inhabitants are styled in a way that suggests they’re all a bit lost in time. Several rooms of the house contain furniture covered in sheets, silently waiting to be put to use again. They lost electricity so often during the war, Grace says, they just learned to live without it. She walks the halls carrying an oil lamp, pocketing jagged keys that open the fifty doors of the house. As she searches the attic for clues to the previous residents who might be haunting her, she comes across an album of postmortem photography. 

According to Mrs. Mills, postmortem photography was used by hopeful Victorians practicing some form of spiritualism, a popular religious movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She claims they believed a photo of their deceased loved one would let their spirit live on. That is not true, and in fact the actual reason for postmortem photography is a much better fit for the story that The Others is telling. While the Victorians had complicated and superstitious rituals around death, posing and photographing dead bodies had a more practical origin. At the time it became popular, professional photographs were expensive, time consuming, and rare. With children dying much more frequently than today, a postmortem photograph might be the only opportunity a family had to have an image of their lost son or daughter. It was a way of holding on, of sinking your fingers tight into something you’ve already lost.  

Amenabar also employs plenty of evocative imagery from both Grace’s Catholic faith and from spiritualism. She clings to rosaries and prayers, and regularly uses the threat of eternal damnation to keep her children in line. Though spiritualism had mostly fallen out of fashion by the end of World War II, its presence in The Others adds to the film’s sense of existing out of time. Spiritualists believed strongly and literally in life after death, and in the power of the dead to communicate with the living through practices like table rapping. When a group gathers to host a seance, intent on communicating with the ghosts haunting Grace’s house, the medium attempts the spiritualist practice of auto-writing: she asks questions and blindly scrawls the answers given by the ghosts. As she uncovers the great mystery at the center of the story, Grace and her children come to a horrific realization.

Most ghost stories are about grief and longing and pain. The idea that we have unfinished business in life that tethers us to the things and places we loved is just a way to cope with losing our loved ones. The Others is no exception. But it dives deeper than that, too. It concerns itself with the ravages of war, the uncertainty and fear of childhood, and the thrumming, constant ache of loneliness. It all compounds inside a darkened, nearly silent house tucked away and forgotten in the fog. “This house is ours,” Grace chants as she clutches her children. “This house is ours, this house is ours...”  A house can be ours, but we might not be alone in it.